Nation Vaccinated Against Pandemic That Never Shows; Pandemic Sends No Apology

The whole business started, as these things do, with one guy. In February 1976 a private at Fort Dix felt lousy, went out on an overnight hike anyway, and died. The bug that got him was a swine influenza, and to the men running the Centers for Disease Control it rhymed, uncomfortably, with the strain that had emptied cemeteries in 1918.¹ The other soldiers who caught it recovered without much fuss — but by then the word 'pandemic' was loose, and a word like that does not go quietly back in the bottle.

What followed was less a public-health program than a moon shot with needles. CDC director David Sencer sent up a memo laying out the options, all of which somehow arrived at 'vaccinate everybody,' and which had a way of making any other choice look like negligence.² On March 24 President Ford went on television between Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin — the two patron saints of the syringe — and asked Congress for $135 million to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the nation.³

There was a hitch, and the hitch was money. The insurance companies took one look and declined to cover the vaccine makers, who in turn declined to make vaccine. So the government agreed to assume the liability itself — a detail kept well under the bunting at the time, and the single most expensive sentence anyone signed all year.³

Then came the anticlimax of the decade. America vaccinated some 43 million people, a national record, and the swine flu — the entire reason for the exercise — simply never arrived.⁴ In its place arrived Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare paralysis that surfaced in roughly 450 of the vaccinated, about 32 of whom died. On December 16, 1976, the program was halted.⁴ The pandemic had ghosted the country; the lawsuits had not. Washington spent the next several years paying out the indemnity it had cheerfully volunteered for in March, having successfully defended the Republic against a disease that, in the event, declined to attend.⁵

I am asking the Congress to appropriate $135 million… to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States.— President Gerald R. Ford, televised address, March 24, 1976